Sat, 19 Aug 2006

Wednesday I made my annual one-day trip to Linuxworld in San
Francisco. There wasn't much of great interest at the conference
this year: the usual collection of corporate booths (minus Redhat,
notably absent this year), virtualization as a hot keyword (but perhaps
less than the last two years) and a fair selection of sysadmin tools,
not much desktop Linux (two laptop vendors), and a somewhat light
"Dot Org" area compared to the last few years.

I was happy to notice that most of the big corporate
booths were running Linux on a majority of show machines, a nice
contrast from earlier years. (Dell was the exception, with more
Windows than Linux, but even they weren't all Windows.)

Linuxworld supposedly offers a wireless network but I never managed to
get it to work, either in the exhibit hall or in the building where
the BOFs were held.

Wednesday afternoon's BOF list didn't offer much that immediately
grabbed me, but in the end I chose one on introducing desktop
Linux to corporate environments. Run by a couple of IBM Linux
advocates, the BOF turned out to be interesting and well presented,
offering lots of sensible advice (base your arguments to management
on business advantages, like money saved or increased ability to get
the job done, not on promises of cool features; don't aim for a
wholesale switch to Linux, merely for a policy which allows employees
to choose; argue for standards-based corporate infrastructure since
that allows for more choice and avoids lock-in). There was plenty
of discussion between the audience and the folks leading the BOF,
and I think most attendees got something out of it.

More interesting than Linuxworld was Friday's Ubucon,
a free Ubuntu conference held at Google (and spilling over into
Saturday morning).
Despite a lack of advertising, the Ubucon was very well attended.
There were two tracks, ostensibly "beginner" and "expert", but
even aside from my own GIMP talk being a "beginner" topic, I
ended up hanging out in the "beginner" room for the whole day,
for topics like "Power Management", "How to Get Involved", and
"What Do Non Geeks Need?" (the last topic dovetailing into the
concluding session Linux corporate desktops).

All of the sessions were quite interactive
with lots of discussion and questions from the audience.
Everyone looked like they were having a good time, and I'm sure
several of us are motivated to get more deeply involved with Ubuntu.

Ubucon was a great example of a low-key, fun,
somewhat technical conference on a shoestring budget and I'd love to
see more conferences like this in the bay area.

Finally, the week wrapped up with the annual Linux Picnic in
Sunnyvale, a Silicon Valley tradition for many years and always a good
time. There were some organizational glitches this year ... but it's
hard to complain much about a free geek picnic in perfect weather
complete with t-shirts, an installfest, a raffle and even (by
mid-afternoon) a wireless network. Fun stuff!